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You might not need Kubernetes

blog.jessfraz.com

61–70 of 319 posts

Re: You might not need Kubernetes

#61

Some day I would like a powwow with all you hackers about whether 99% of apps need more than a $5 droplet from Digital Ocean, set up the old-fashioned way, LAMP --- though feel free to switch out the letters: BSD instead of Linux, Nginx instead of Apache, PostgreSQL instead of MySQL, Ruby or Python instead of PHP. I manage dozens of apps for thousands of users. The apps are all on one server, its load average around…

Does hacker news really run on one server? What if server goes down? I've always though high availability was the more important reason for multiple servers, rather than performance. Even if you have only two paying customers, they are probably paying for the right to hit your website / service 24/7.

One application server, yes. HN is fronted by Cloudflare for CDN + DDoS protection, which of course is a lot more than one server.

That's why if you get a particularly long thread (1k+ comments), admins will beg people to log out so that the responses can be served from the CDN cache.

Example: American 2016 presidential election https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12909752 (1,700 comments)

Re: You might not need Kubernetes

#62
post #16

Yeah, you probably don't. And not only that, but it probably makes your life harder. I've interviewed for a tech lead position at a company working with freelancers and I'm pretty sure the reason they ended up rejecting me was that I mentioned the technical interviewer that I think containers, container infrastructures (like Kubernetes) and even cloud infrastructure is being overused/used without giving too much thou…

I once got an interview from a company in the container space because one of their exec read an article I published talking about the trouble with container systems[1]. (Really good talk/interview, but I ended up not moving forward because I didn't want to move back to the west coast). I've been in smaller shops that wasted a lot of time on K8s stuff and fell behind on their timeline. If you want to run k8s, DC/OS, e…

I haven't been following OpenStack closely enough to understand the way you feel that it's gone or what I assume is an implication that it failed to work (in which sense?).

Re: You might not need Kubernetes

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once got an interview from a company in the container space because one of their exec read an article I published talking about the trouble with container systems[1]. (Really good talk/interview, but I ended up not moving forward because I didn't want to move back to the west coast). I've been in smaller shops that wasted a lot of time on K8s stuff and fell behind on their timeline. If you want to run k8s, DC/OS, e…

4-8 dedicate staff members to run k8s? seriously, How did you come up with that number? 1) You can run k8s hosted on Google, DigitalOcean with zero effort. 2) I built a k8s cluster in 3 days with zero experience after spending a week playing with minikube, reading the docs are kuberentes.io

> I built a k8s cluster in 3 days with zero experience after spending a week playing with minikube, reading the docs are kuberentes.io

I'm pretty sure I can do it in an afternoon from scripts on github. But if something goes wrong all bets are off. Just getting something setup is not building a competence around it.

Re: You might not need Kubernetes

#64
post #16

Yeah, you probably don't. And not only that, but it probably makes your life harder. I've interviewed for a tech lead position at a company working with freelancers and I'm pretty sure the reason they ended up rejecting me was that I mentioned the technical interviewer that I think containers, container infrastructures (like Kubernetes) and even cloud infrastructure is being overused/used without giving too much thou…

I once got an interview from a company in the container space because one of their exec read an article I published talking about the trouble with container systems[1]. (Really good talk/interview, but I ended up not moving forward because I didn't want to move back to the west coast). I've been in smaller shops that wasted a lot of time on K8s stuff and fell behind on their timeline. If you want to run k8s, DC/OS, e…

Having installed Openstack many times before, often having issues with it running:

> t k8s will go the way of Open Stack since it does actually work,

_ohh shit__!

Re: You might not need Kubernetes

#65
post #43
post #11

"Anyways, the point I am trying to make is you should use whatever is the easiest thing for your use case and not just what is popular on the internet. " This is good advice in theory but in the real employment world you are killing your own career that way. At some point you get marked as "dinosaur" that hasn't "kept up". Much better to jump on the latest tech trend.

I don't know. I've always found having an actual, functional product to be more impressive than a list of buzzwords on your resume. And most of the buzzword-driven development doesn't usually lead to a functioning system.

If you're buzzword compliant, you can fail forward. Your last product may not have worked out, but you've become an expert in Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, OpenShift, and Terraform which means that companies who are committed to the cloud (i.e., everybody) won't pass you over.

Built an app that works before the cloud hype hit? Congratulations. You're a specialist in legacy technologies. We'll call you if we have a COBOL or Perl app that needs maintenance. snicker

Re: You might not need Kubernetes

#66
Most organizations don't need to manage servers or Ansible playbooks either.

The reason Kubernetes became so popular is because the API was largely application-centric, as opposed to server-centric. Instead of conflating the patching and configuration of ssh and kernels with the configuration of an application, you had clearly separate objects meant to solve different application needs.

The problem with Kubernetes is that to gain that API you need deploy and manage etcd. To bring your API objects to life you need the rest of the control plane, and to let your objects grow into your application you need worker nodes and a good grasp of networking.

This is a huge burden in order to gain access to K8's simple semantics.

GKE helps greatly, but the cluster semantics still come to the forefront whenever there's a problem, or upgrade, or deprecation, or credential rotation.

Of course there's always a time for worrying about those semantics. Specialized workloads might have some crazy requirements that nothing off the shelf will run. However I think the mass market is ready for a K8s implementation that just takes Deployments and Services, and hides the rest from you.

In lieu of that, people will just continue adoption of App Engine and other highly-managed platforms, because while you might not need Kubernetes, you almost certainly don't need to go back to Ansible.

Re: You might not need Kubernetes

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does hacker news really run on one server? What if server goes down? I've always though high availability was the more important reason for multiple servers, rather than performance. Even if you have only two paying customers, they are probably paying for the right to hit your website / service 24/7.

Has hacker news ever gone down? I cant remember it ever going dkwnt but I assume it has to have at some point.

Here's the official status twitter: https://twitter.com/hnstatus

Re: You might not need Kubernetes

#68
I do my level best to stay away from containers. I don't think most people even need them. It's a fad of sorts. I tend to stick with the tried and true and not follow trends, cloud or otherwise. Nothing worse than having your data on someone else's HW and losing connectivity through no fault of your own. Years ago, I worked for UUNET in Reston/Ashburn, VA, and built web servers and the attendant HW/SW that ran them (usually Sun Solaris/Apache/Oracle). We always had a "back net" into every device. Now? One NIC, one way in. I always like having more than one way to get to a device, be it local or remote. With the cloud, you tend to give this up. I recommend VMs over the cloud using someone else's data and data centre. Nothing worse than going to a tech conference with your boss, and him being the "deer in the headlights" as it were with regard to buying into what's being sold by the vendors. Last time we went, it took me the entire 3-hour car ride home to convince him we didn't need half of what was on offer. I tend to be old school and prefer to make do with Linux/FreeBSD VMs, and whatever software is needed to make something work. I like being in control of my own architecture.

Re: You might not need Kubernetes

#69

Some day I would like a powwow with all you hackers about whether 99% of apps need more than a $5 droplet from Digital Ocean, set up the old-fashioned way, LAMP --- though feel free to switch out the letters: BSD instead of Linux, Nginx instead of Apache, PostgreSQL instead of MySQL, Ruby or Python instead of PHP. I manage dozens of apps for thousands of users. The apps are all on one server, its load average around…

For reference, this runs on a $5 AWS instance: https://hnprofile.com/ The database is $600 per month, but that data runs five different websites (and it's a few hundred Gb of data). EDIT: for those mentioning the 502 gateway error, it does auto scales - Now it's costing more per month, at least temporarily.

Not a good example as it is currently 502'ing: https://i.imgur.com/sU8Zn5v.png

Re: You might not need Kubernetes

#70

Some day I would like a powwow with all you hackers about whether 99% of apps need more than a $5 droplet from Digital Ocean, set up the old-fashioned way, LAMP --- though feel free to switch out the letters: BSD instead of Linux, Nginx instead of Apache, PostgreSQL instead of MySQL, Ruby or Python instead of PHP. I manage dozens of apps for thousands of users. The apps are all on one server, its load average around…

For reference, this runs on a $5 AWS instance: https://hnprofile.com/ The database is $600 per month, but that data runs five different websites (and it's a few hundred Gb of data). EDIT: for those mentioning the 502 gateway error, it does auto scales - Now it's costing more per month, at least temporarily.

>502 Bad Gateway

maybe a $5 instance isn't enough

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